KEEP Healthy

Test Your IQ

Between holiday parties and other seasonal celebrations, the holidays are filled with treats and sweet temptations. Take our quiz and see how much you know about sugar.

Approximately how many packets of sugar are there in a 12 oz can of soda?

1

5

10

The answer is (C) 10 packets. Can you imagine eating 10 sugar packets in one sitting? That’s what you are effectively doing each time you drink a regular 12 oz can of soda. If you drink one can of soda a day, you can potentially save yourself 100-150 extra calories each day by swapping out this can of soda with water or seltzer. While this may not seem like a big deal, it adds up over the course of a week and a year.

For example, if you cut out 100 calories a day, let’s see how many calories you would be saving over a one month period:

100 (calories) x 30 (number of days in a month) = 3,000 calories. These are the number of calories that you will have “saved” or not eaten over the course of a month.

One pound of fat is equal to 3,500 calories. Dividing 3,000 (the number of calories saved in a month by swapping out soda for water) by 3,500 (the number of calories in a pound of fat) = almost 1 lb.

Over a year, simply cutting back on soda could amount to almost 12 pounds of weight loss, which is quite significant! While losing weight alone is an impressive feat, the bonus is the ripple effect. Weight loss can also positively impact your blood pressure, Body Mass Index (BMI), cholesterol levels, and other health numbers. This is just one example of how making small lifestyle changes can really add up to improve your overall health.